Learnt Hindi in school (Indian, but not a native-speaker), and am trying to learn Mandarin through my girlfriend, so my perspective might be slightly biased. But I find it fascinating that while Mandarin almost uniformly tries to sino-fy, if you will, all imported words, in Indian languages, we rarely try to. Persian words remain as such, and so do English words ('kampyUTar' for computer, as opposed to a more literal 'gaNaank')
The tones can kill, though, at least initially, if you're tone-deaf like me. But as with everything, all it needs is a bit of practice.
Re:Google Andriod is about to be hit by a steamrol
on
Android Phones Delayed
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I'm sorry, but how do I put it:- the American market simply does not count, when it comes to mobiles. As much as I don't mind cheering US to win in other respects, you folks have an aging infrastructure and have a very very small footprint in terms of actual growth metrics.
Look at it this way. Nokia now sells fourteen mobiles every minute worldwide. Most of Africa's new boom is because of mobile-commerce; people barter talk-time for actual commodities. In comparison, in the US, you still pay for text messages, and, here's a pet peeve, it costs cheaper to call from Singapore to LA, than it is to call LA from Seattle. Trust me on this one; I've tried it a few weeks back.
Nokia's brand-name is not big in the US? Who-effing-cares. It's a mediocre market at best; that's not where the phone companies should be looking out for anyway.
We developed a PoC on Silverlight in January on version 1.0. It's now June, and the Silverlight SDK has seen four revisions, each revision being completely backwards-incompatible with the previous.
What's worse, last week Microsoft quietly pulled the rug on earlier versions (1.1 alpha in particular); all our previously developed apps suddenly stopped working. Whether this was built into the original redistributable or whether a Windows Update did it, is something we'll never know; the fact was that all our SL 1.1a apps stopped working.
This EOL-ing wasn't just ridiculously frustrating, it was also bone-headed; after tinkering around a bit, we found that if you change the system date (at the client) back to 2007, everything worked properly. Three man-days down the drain on this wholly avoidable mess.
So yes. You were saying something about closed-source being more profitable and less nerve-racking than OSS?
Nothing against Dallas or Houston or Austin, but that the corporate culture in these places is different from what it is in Palo Alto. If you believe it is, and root for the Bay Area Way of Doing Things, I guess it's a net loss.
Me? I don't believe in any of that stuff. Seen HP in action in Europe and Asia before (and during) Fiorina's reign, and they were as miles apart from Palo Alto's free-wheeling culture as Houston presumably is. Nothing new, although it is definitely true (and sad!) that it's becoming the dominant paradigm.
As I see it, the laptop market operates in four segments, purely on price-points:- a) micro ones ( less than S$1000, that's Singapore dollars), b) entry-level ones (S$1000 - S$2000), c) mid-range ones (S$2000 - S$3000), d) high-end models (S$3000+)
MacBookPro is in (d), while MacBook straddles (b) and (c) without quite being (c). (That is to say, it's at the higher-end of the entry-level segment, and I position it there mostly coz it has an integrated Intel graphics card; all models in (c) have dedicated graphics/ sound cards)
The Mac line does suffer a bit in my opinion in that there's no comparable mid-range model, which is what a Dell XPS or a HP mediacenter-whatchamaycallit is.
A MacBookPro is a really high-end laptop and is comparable to Sony Vaio or ThinkPad's; don't think it's an apples-to-apples comparison with Inspiron. There's more to a laptop than pure-features comparison; at the S$3000 range, you pay for a lesser failure rate.
Back in the day, wrote a method called ReturnOfTheJedi() which had a parameter called theJediWhereTrick. Returned a search result, but with an optional where clause in the SQL query.
Kept fielding emails about that for six months straight, from the company's offices in Palo Alto and Singapore. Fun times.
Silverlight 1.1 Alpha has been out only for a few months, and is still not recommended for use in production systems. If anybody was wondering, v1.1 is where it really became usable, with its C# codebehinds and such; v1.0 merely had clunky calls via JavaScript. In short, it's too early for any meaningful comparisons with Flash; just wait till June or so, when the usual Microsoft developer-advertising channels ("TechEd") kick in.
(Fair disclaimer: for reasons I can't explain on a public Internet thread, I'm professionally involved with Silverlight.)
I'm no American and have zero locus-standi in the elections (except for this minor nuclear deal your country is making with mine), but here's what I'm thinking: you're effectively choosing the US president from three very good candidates? I say this because the good ol' party machinery seems to be mostly dead here; Obama got 47% of the vote in TX despite having the Dem rank and file behind him.
Personally, I think it's time you folks recognize what seems to be extremely apparent to me: the two-party system is dead. In its place, you're evolving a system where political startups, if you will, first get funding, and then sell a product called as a presidential candidate. It's currently messy, and there are a lot of unsavoury things going on, but if I were to take a guess, that's where the US is headed. Don't think about all those folks voting in open primaries now; think about how they'd expect the next election process will be.
Hmmm, I'll qualify that. Unless the Dem super-delegates pull some weird tricks out of their hats, the two-party system is dead.
And here I was thinking it had more to do with how much power the 3G chips consume, and how it would negatively effect how many hours you can get out of a fully charged battery.
I get close to a week between recharges on my Nokia E51. And I surf the net on broadband speeds on this using HSDPA (which the phone somehow calls as '3.5 G'). This is waaaay more battery-power than my friend's (cracked; they haven't released it as yet in Asia) iPhone.
You may be a lowly programmer, but here's some nuance that you're missing: the problem that Apple had wasn't that 3G's power consumption wasn't manageable, but that it couldn't get a long battery life for the functions it wanted in an iPhone. That is to say, 3G per se is fine, but 3G + touch-screen + 8 gigs can get difficult.
Additionally, the iPhone is primarily catered for the US market, and I've been led to understand that 3G penetration is not that significant out there. Most urban centers in Europe and Asia have overlapping networks (heck, most of my friends aren't even taking ADSL or broadband-cable lines; all of them are switching to HSDPA), so 3G is kind of the de-facto standard.
Wasn't clear the way the GP was worded, but you need to specifically shut-off indexing for that to happen. Will, of course, be extremely interesting if you did, in fact, shut-off indexing before trying this.
Easily dealt with through Facebook's privacy controls.
Serious question, but could you tell me how I can stop sharing, say, my demographic with, say, Scrabulous? I clicked on 'Edit Settings' at the application, and got the following stuff:-
Left Menu: Show this in my left-hand menu. News Feed: Publish stories about this in my News Feed. Mini-Feed: Publish stories about this in my Mini-Feed. Profile Links: Add a link below the profile picture to any profile. Email: Allow this application to contact me via email.
Let's do this again. How do I stop Facebook from sharing demographic information about me with applications? Where does it say what information is being shared? Why does Facebook have to be so secretive about this all?
The average age at the local ham radio association is 40+, all men. The average age at a local travel enthusiast group (that's organized over the net) is about 24, with a mixed group of people from all over the world. Guess where everyone wants to hang out?
The interesting thing about this lawsuit is not that Penguin et al are making money of it all; clearly, I'm sure virtually *all* Chuck-Norris-facts sites out there are selling some sort of ads or the other. What is really interesting that Chuck Norris seems to give a higher standard for books; clearly, when the message moved from the web to a book, he seems to be suddenly concerned.
Which, of course, is not say his suit is wrong or anything; I can see why it would bother him and all that. All the same, I think it's a rather telling point on how we view different media in general (if I may, indeed, extrapolate Chuck Norris' experience into the wider society); we seem to treat books as something sarcosanct and sacred. The burden of proof is much much higher for books than for the web.
InstaColl is a Bangalore-based start-up founded with a singular vision - establish the first "Made by India" product brand that is globally recognized and appreciated. Please note that is "Made by India" and not just "Made in India" - half the software products in the world are probably already developed to some extent in India but can you name even one product brand made by India...no? We thought so - this is therefore our raison d[']être...
Confusing run-ons notwithstanding (and in fact, I would disagree, unless they specifically meant Web2.0-isque products), there's a bit of a ra-ra-India chest-beating going on out here. You then have that sentiment followed by this gem of a sentence:
InstaColl was founded by a bunch of average-Joe technologists aided and abetted by the favorite poster boy of Indian IT.
Note three points here:-
a) "Favorite" not 'favourite' : These guys are thinking "global", which apparently, is en-US.
b) AND YET, you have that very superfluous, Indian construct, "of the". In a different place and dialect, that sentence would have, probably, read as "Indian IT's favourite poster-boy" or something; it is a very very Indian habit to convert adjectives into nouns with an "of the" construct.
c) You usually aid and abet someone in crime, not to fund a start-up. While, of course, they might have used the phrase tongues firmly in cheek, long experience in editting such documents tells me that they, perhaps, didn't think about it too much. The idiom hits the general spot they were aiming for; so they didn't quite think about, well, not using it. Again, this is usually a result of reading English more than you speak; truth be told, I'm also occassionally guilty of doing that. [As also use more c's and s's than necessary at times;-)]
In addition to using quaint phrases, and wrong idiomatic usage, (traditional) written Indian-English is also quite understated; for the line you quoted, you could easily imagine the copy-writer thinking about writing, "More Powerful than Office!" but then telling herself that she's probably better off saying, it matches Office 2007. This is a common pattern in Indian-English; here's an article where the author hints at that understatement ("self-important colonials... decreed that when an exalted civil servant says "may," trembling lesser breeds should hear "shall."")
[A] recent book, "Indlish",... notes that: "Indian English suffers from flatulent orotundity, a form of high-flown language that tries to impress but instead obscures." This style of speaking and writing, the book argues, is a hangover from the Raj and the bureaucratic officialese that it bequeathed to India.
Favorites or not, you get this distinct impression of a previous generation's "good-name" Ind-glish is struggling to come out into a globalized world here.
On a related subject, I am an Architect who currently works as a technical design consultant, and I am very disappointed at what I've read in this tread so far...Truly depressing
Welcome to one of the world's largest water-cooler conversations. Don't let the negativity affect you; while they may be otherwise pushing the boundary in their professional spheres, Slashdotters often lack a sense of wonder in discussions like this. It's not just buildings; look at any thread where a new product or spec was announced. People come here to escape the real world, not to change it. Only when you realize that fact would you appreciate the cognitive dissonance involved in, say, reading posts where people wish for, say, mobiles that can make and receive calls and do nothing else.
Slashdot's politics may or may not be liberal, its outlook towards technology (and by extension, engineering) has always been whiny, negative and conservative.
Slashdot Mirror
Learnt Hindi in school (Indian, but not a native-speaker), and am trying to learn Mandarin through my girlfriend, so my perspective might be slightly biased. But I find it fascinating that while Mandarin almost uniformly tries to sino-fy, if you will, all imported words, in Indian languages, we rarely try to. Persian words remain as such, and so do English words ('kampyUTar' for computer, as opposed to a more literal 'gaNaank')
The tones can kill, though, at least initially, if you're tone-deaf like me. But as with everything, all it needs is a bit of practice.
I'm sorry, but how do I put it:- the American market simply does not count, when it comes to mobiles. As much as I don't mind cheering US to win in other respects, you folks have an aging infrastructure and have a very very small footprint in terms of actual growth metrics.
Look at it this way. Nokia now sells fourteen mobiles every minute worldwide. Most of Africa's new boom is because of mobile-commerce; people barter talk-time for actual commodities. In comparison, in the US, you still pay for text messages, and, here's a pet peeve, it costs cheaper to call from Singapore to LA, than it is to call LA from Seattle. Trust me on this one; I've tried it a few weeks back.
Nokia's brand-name is not big in the US? Who-effing-cares. It's a mediocre market at best; that's not where the phone companies should be looking out for anyway.
We developed a PoC on Silverlight in January on version 1.0. It's now June, and the Silverlight SDK has seen four revisions, each revision being completely backwards-incompatible with the previous.
What's worse, last week Microsoft quietly pulled the rug on earlier versions (1.1 alpha in particular); all our previously developed apps suddenly stopped working. Whether this was built into the original redistributable or whether a Windows Update did it, is something we'll never know; the fact was that all our SL 1.1a apps stopped working.
This EOL-ing wasn't just ridiculously frustrating, it was also bone-headed; after tinkering around a bit, we found that if you change the system date (at the client) back to 2007, everything worked properly. Three man-days down the drain on this wholly avoidable mess.
So yes. You were saying something about closed-source being more profitable and less nerve-racking than OSS?
Nothing against Dallas or Houston or Austin, but that the corporate culture in these places is different from what it is in Palo Alto. If you believe it is, and root for the Bay Area Way of Doing Things, I guess it's a net loss.
Me? I don't believe in any of that stuff. Seen HP in action in Europe and Asia before (and during) Fiorina's reign, and they were as miles apart from Palo Alto's free-wheeling culture as Houston presumably is. Nothing new, although it is definitely true (and sad!) that it's becoming the dominant paradigm.
As I see it, the laptop market operates in four segments, purely on price-points:- a) micro ones ( less than S$1000, that's Singapore dollars), b) entry-level ones (S$1000 - S$2000), c) mid-range ones (S$2000 - S$3000), d) high-end models (S$3000+)
MacBookPro is in (d), while MacBook straddles (b) and (c) without quite being (c). (That is to say, it's at the higher-end of the entry-level segment, and I position it there mostly coz it has an integrated Intel graphics card; all models in (c) have dedicated graphics/ sound cards)
The Mac line does suffer a bit in my opinion in that there's no comparable mid-range model, which is what a Dell XPS or a HP mediacenter-whatchamaycallit is.
A MacBookPro is a really high-end laptop and is comparable to Sony Vaio or ThinkPad's; don't think it's an apples-to-apples comparison with Inspiron. There's more to a laptop than pure-features comparison; at the S$3000 range, you pay for a lesser failure rate.
Back in the day, wrote a method called ReturnOfTheJedi() which had a parameter called theJediWhereTrick. Returned a search result, but with an optional where clause in the SQL query.
Kept fielding emails about that for six months straight, from the company's offices in Palo Alto and Singapore. Fun times.
Hasn't. Will be, this fall.
Sad. :-( SICP was one of the best courses I ever took in univ; I'm sure I sound like an old-time when I say this, but without Scheme, there is no SICP.
.Silverlight 1.1 Alpha has been out only for a few months, and is still not recommended for use in production systems. If anybody was wondering, v1.1 is where it really became usable, with its C# codebehinds and such; v1.0 merely had clunky calls via JavaScript. In short, it's too early for any meaningful comparisons with Flash; just wait till June or so, when the usual Microsoft developer-advertising channels ("TechEd") kick in.
(Fair disclaimer: for reasons I can't explain on a public Internet thread, I'm professionally involved with Silverlight.)
I'm no American and have zero locus-standi in the elections (except for this minor nuclear deal your country is making with mine), but here's what I'm thinking: you're effectively choosing the US president from three very good candidates? I say this because the good ol' party machinery seems to be mostly dead here; Obama got 47% of the vote in TX despite having the Dem rank and file behind him.
Personally, I think it's time you folks recognize what seems to be extremely apparent to me: the two-party system is dead. In its place, you're evolving a system where political startups, if you will, first get funding, and then sell a product called as a presidential candidate. It's currently messy, and there are a lot of unsavoury things going on, but if I were to take a guess, that's where the US is headed. Don't think about all those folks voting in open primaries now; think about how they'd expect the next election process will be.
Hmmm, I'll qualify that. Unless the Dem super-delegates pull some weird tricks out of their hats, the two-party system is dead.
I get close to a week between recharges on my Nokia E51. And I surf the net on broadband speeds on this using HSDPA (which the phone somehow calls as '3.5 G'). This is waaaay more battery-power than my friend's (cracked; they haven't released it as yet in Asia) iPhone.
You may be a lowly programmer, but here's some nuance that you're missing: the problem that Apple had wasn't that 3G's power consumption wasn't manageable, but that it couldn't get a long battery life for the functions it wanted in an iPhone. That is to say, 3G per se is fine, but 3G + touch-screen + 8 gigs can get difficult.
Additionally, the iPhone is primarily catered for the US market, and I've been led to understand that 3G penetration is not that significant out there. Most urban centers in Europe and Asia have overlapping networks (heck, most of my friends aren't even taking ADSL or broadband-cable lines; all of them are switching to HSDPA), so 3G is kind of the de-facto standard.
That was BrainNet. These guys are a different ISP. In South Asia, genius and stupidity compete for the same internet-ready demographic. :-)
(Windows 2003 Server user)
Serious question, but could you tell me how I can stop sharing, say, my demographic with, say, Scrabulous? I clicked on 'Edit Settings' at the application, and got the following stuff:-
Let's do this again. How do I stop Facebook from sharing demographic information about me with applications? Where does it say what information is being shared? Why does Facebook have to be so secretive about this all?
No, no, you guys are alright. I'm fairly certain that the earlier Token Filipino was deadpanning to an obviously clueless American.
[Not a Filipino, I just play one in karoake bars. ;-) ]
A very pertinent observation. I don't know if the story-writers intended it, but there's a shooting-the-messenger theme out there somewhere.
What's the difference between HSDPA and WiMax? I already have a 1.5 MBPS HSDPA line for my mobile; what additional stuff would WiMax provide?
Thanks!
The average age at the local ham radio association is 40+, all men. The average age at a local travel enthusiast group (that's organized over the net) is about 24, with a mixed group of people from all over the world. Guess where everyone wants to hang out?
Everyone has ex's. Unrequited love is massively popular, even in /. world. :-)
You sir, have not only written the funniest thing I've read in a day, but have also have won the thread. I think we can all go home now.
Also, you owe me a new laptop.
The interesting thing about this lawsuit is not that Penguin et al are making money of it all; clearly, I'm sure virtually *all* Chuck-Norris-facts sites out there are selling some sort of ads or the other. What is really interesting that Chuck Norris seems to give a higher standard for books; clearly, when the message moved from the web to a book, he seems to be suddenly concerned.
Which, of course, is not say his suit is wrong or anything; I can see why it would bother him and all that. All the same, I think it's a rather telling point on how we view different media in general (if I may, indeed, extrapolate Chuck Norris' experience into the wider society); we seem to treat books as something sarcosanct and sacred. The burden of proof is much much higher for books than for the web.
You had?
Methinks that's a bit of Indian understatement at work there. :-)
Why do I say this? Consider the About Us page:
Confusing run-ons notwithstanding (and in fact, I would disagree, unless they specifically meant Web2.0-isque products), there's a bit of a ra-ra-India chest-beating going on out here. You then have that sentiment followed by this gem of a sentence:
Note three points here:- ;-)]
a) "Favorite" not 'favourite' : These guys are thinking "global", which apparently, is en-US.
b) AND YET, you have that very superfluous, Indian construct, "of the". In a different place and dialect, that sentence would have, probably, read as "Indian IT's favourite poster-boy" or something; it is a very very Indian habit to convert adjectives into nouns with an "of the" construct.
c) You usually aid and abet someone in crime, not to fund a start-up. While, of course, they might have used the phrase tongues firmly in cheek, long experience in editting such documents tells me that they, perhaps, didn't think about it too much. The idiom hits the general spot they were aiming for; so they didn't quite think about, well, not using it. Again, this is usually a result of reading English more than you speak; truth be told, I'm also occassionally guilty of doing that. [As also use more c's and s's than necessary at times
In addition to using quaint phrases, and wrong idiomatic usage, (traditional) written Indian-English is also quite understated; for the line you quoted, you could easily imagine the copy-writer thinking about writing, "More Powerful than Office!" but then telling herself that she's probably better off saying, it matches Office 2007. This is a common pattern in Indian-English; here's an article where the author hints at that understatement ("self-important colonials ... decreed that when an exalted civil servant says "may," trembling lesser breeds should hear "shall."")
Another article making a similar point:
Favorites or not, you get this distinct impression of a previous generation's "good-name" Ind-glish is struggling to come out into a globalized world here.
I'm sure you missed the part where Rowling was actively contributing to the wiki herself.
I'm thinking the courts would disagree with you on that one.
There are some commute options (don't mind the glitzy colours there) that apparently support cargo as well.
Welcome to one of the world's largest water-cooler conversations. Don't let the negativity affect you; while they may be otherwise pushing the boundary in their professional spheres, Slashdotters often lack a sense of wonder in discussions like this. It's not just buildings; look at any thread where a new product or spec was announced. People come here to escape the real world, not to change it. Only when you realize that fact would you appreciate the cognitive dissonance involved in, say, reading posts where people wish for, say, mobiles that can make and receive calls and do nothing else.
Slashdot's politics may or may not be liberal, its outlook towards technology (and by extension, engineering) has always been whiny, negative and conservative.